


The Readiness is All

by Unsentimentalf



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-06
Updated: 2017-10-06
Packaged: 2019-01-09 20:36:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12283953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unsentimentalf/pseuds/Unsentimentalf
Summary: Blake has slept in the med unit beyond the death of his entire world and the creation of an unexpected and unsettling new one.





	The Readiness is All

He woke just enough to be aware of the slowly building sensation, the climax, then sleep. 

Awake, a little. He thought that this had happened before. The massage of his genitals distracted him. He came. He slept.

Not just once. Many times. What? he thought. Then sensation wiped the question from his mind and he fell yet again into sleep. 

Dark. It was dark. He tried to open his eyes but his body didn’t seem to be interested in responding. The smooth pulse of pressure around his erection built without hesitation to the orgasm. Why? he thought and was dragged down, still wondering, into unconsciousness. 

Not just eyelids. Nothing responded. He lay dormant inside his own body, No sound, no smell, no light, no touch except for the touch that wasn’t a hand or an orifice that brought him without hesitation to climax and sleep again. 

How many times had he laid there, motionless, in the few minutes between awake and asleep? There was nothing to count, only the sense that it had happened for as long back as forever. 

“I should be...” his thought tailed off. Frightened? Angry? He didn’t know. The surge of climax overtook his puzzlement, and yet again he slept. 

At last he knew something. He didn’t want to sleep any more. “Don’t” he said, not aloud but he could feel his throat vibrate just a little. To his surprise the touch stopped. His cock ached slightly at the abandonment. He slept again. 

Then he woke to light coming through his eyelids, which opened when he commanded them. Above him light of a hundred colours shimmered through protuberances of a dozen dozen shapes. He turned his head to see that he was surrounded by colours and geometry, and there, his clothes. 

His clothes. He was Blake. Roj Blake. He slid off the thing he had been lying on, the same bright colours and eye wrenching shapes as everything else. His gun lay with the rest of his belongings, the battery two thirds exhausted.

How long had forever been? He brushed his chin. A month’s beard, at least. What had happened to the ship? He dressed rapidly, keeping the gun in his hand.

Something came through the chaos that was a wall. Someone. It looked human, only smooth skin and clothes had been replaced by tiny protrusions and colour shimmered constantly through it, clothes and skin alike. The human-alien hybrid was almost too disturbing to look at, but Blake looked anyway. 

“Who are you?”

“You human. Not human.” There was no intonation in its voice. 

That much he'd worked out for himself. “Where's my ship?” 

“Anywhere,” the alien said, unhelpfully. 

He stood, legs apart, and glared at the thing. “Why am I here?” 

“Not everywhere. Human not anywhere. Everywhere. You not everywhere.” 

Blake was fairly certain that was important but he couldn't decipher the syntax at all.

“What about the other humans on my ship? What about my crew?”

“Not anywhere,” the alien said. 

“Not anywhere? You mean nowhere? They are dead?” 

There was a pause. "Dead is anywhere. Not anywhere is everywhere."

“Can I go anywhere?” 

Blank eyes considered him. “You are anywhere.” 

“But I'm not dead?” 

“Dead is anywhere. You are anywhere. You are not dead.” 

Blake suspected that he'd just been given a lesson in basic syllogism. “Why did you capture me?” 

“Not.”

“What do you call this then?” He waved at the room.

“Human not anywhere. You anywhere. After you more human anywhere.” 

Dismay was beginning to dawn on Blake. “When you say humans are not anywhere - you mean that they are gone? The ones on my ship?” 

“Human. Everywhere. Not anywhere. Gone.” It couldn’t mean everyone. Could it? 

“Did your people do this?” 

“Human everywhere gone. Not human anywhere. Human anywhere. Human anywhere more human anywhere.”

He thought he could figure some of that. "Your people found me alone? Why did you keep me unconscious?” 

“Human anywhere. Human thoughts not anywhere. Everywhere. More human anywhere now.”

The alien was very insistent on the 'more human anywhere' thing but Blake couldn’t make any sense of it.

“What happened to the other humans?” An impossible question for a creature that only appeared to be comfortable using abstract language in the present tense but he had to ask.

There was a gap in the wall, as uneven as the surface was. The alien moved through it instead of answering and Blake followed. After a few minutes they came out to a larger space with two figures at the far end. 

Blake felt a huge sense of relief. They were human, real humans. Whatever the alien had meant it wasn't that everyone was dead. 

“Hey,” he called out, walking quickly towards them. They were young; maybe fourteen or fifteen, both with brown curls. He thought they were probably siblings. “Can you understand me?” 

The boy staggered towards him, shock and distress on his face. “Anywhere...” he stuttered. ”Everywhere...” The girl pulled the boy upright. “Think human,” she told him sharply, then turned to Blake. “You do not wake." Her voice was precise and oddly, almost familiarly inflected. “Now you wake. This is unexpected.”

“So I gather,” Blake said. “Where did you two come from? Have you seen my ship or my crew?" 

“The not human took from you and made human children. We are the children. Yes." 

Blake felt as stunned as the boy still looked. “My children? That’s not possible. How old are you?”

“Fifteen years, seventy three days, seven hours...” The boy got nudged again. “Inappropriate precision. Apologies. We are fifteen years old.” 

“How long have I been here?” Blake demanded. 

“The not human found you seventeen years and five months ago,” the girl said. “More precision is available.” 

“No, thank you.” Blake said. Seventeen years? His children? “Are there any more of you?”

“What precision is required?” the boy asked. He still looked shaky. 

“Precisely how many more children do I supposedly have?” Blake asked sharply.

The boy drew out an Earth standard looking tablet from a pocket and tapped on it for a few seconds. “Thirteen thousand, seven hundred and sixty four,” he said. “Also one thousand eight hundred and twelve in gestation.” 

That was literally inconceivable so Blake moved onto the next question. “Why didn’t they wake me up?”

“The not human said that your thoughts were not anywhere- that they were gone,” the girl said. “There was only your body left asleep so they used it to make more humans.”

Human anywhere more human anywhere. The alien had been trying to tell him what it had done. Seventeen years as a sperm bank and in the end he’d woken on his own. “What happened to everyone else? The other humans?”

The girl got a look of concentration on her face. Blake tried not to think about how he sometimes looked in the mirror. 

“There was a substance that made human thinking less than human. Many many humans took this substance.”

Blake remembered the dome. “Suppression drugs? Is that what you’re talking about?”

“That was the name, yes. There was a virus. It was changed so that it would return the thinking back again. It was released. It made the humans think again. But after two years it made them fall asleep until eventually they died.”

“All of them?” Blake said, horrified.

“All of them. When the not humans found this galaxy five decades later, they found you asleep inside your ship. Everyone else was nowhere- was gone. They changed your body so that all your children would be immune to the virus and then they made new humans from you so that human would be again. "

“Why would aliens do that?”

“ They looked at what humans had achieved and they thought it was unique. That is what they value.” 

Five decades. His friends, his enemies, the Federation itself was not just dead but fifty years dead. He couldn’t remember anything about why he’d ended up in Liberator’s med unit. Why him and not any of the others? 

He was feeling old and tired and, he feared, not entirely innocent in the matter of this accidentally genocidal virus. He didn’t remember the rebellion scientists talking about a virus to counteract the suppressant drugs but if they had offered one, would he really have insisted on long-term safety trials? Or would he have -had he- killed humanity? 

Everyone dead except for thirteen thousand children that he’d had no say in fathering. He couldn’t imagine a more awful template for humanity than himself. Everything worthwhile that he’d done had been because of someone else’s virtues. He wasn't a good person despite the good people around him so what chance did these kids have? 

“Where’s the ship? Where’s Liberator?” That’s where the answers to the past would be. How could he decide anything in ignorance? That’s if there was anything to decide. There was nothing in these plans to re-establish humanity that appeared to need him, not any more.

 

They went through an alien door into an area so familiar that for a moment Blake could only stare.

“We're on Earth. In a Dome.” 

“Yes,” Dalia said. Her name was apparently Dalia Blake just at the boy's was Jared Blake but Blake couldn't really cope with the fact that the whole of the human race now bore his surname so he'd insisted on the short version. 

The dome was full of children of all ages, as noisy as children tend to be. Some were clearly being shepherded around by teenagers, others seemed to be on their own, riding up and down the escalators, They looked more alike than a class of pupils normally would but they weren't obvious clones like Cally's siblings had been. A few of them stared as Blake walked by and some of the younger ones pushed each other and giggled but many were oblivious to him, busy with their own games. 

“Earth is where your ship was found,” Dalia confirmed. “I don't think that the not humans could move it. This way.” 

They walked for half an hour or so, seeing hundreds of children but only the occasional shining alien in different forms. "We are the first and the translators, " Dalia explained. "Each new child speaks more human, thinks more human than the children made before. When the children are fully human the not human will go and the translators will have no purpose."

“Then what will happen to you?” Blake asked. 

"We will make children of our own. We will watch the children and be happy. We will talk to each other about the not human. We will talk to each other about this day and about Roj Blake."

That didn't sound too dystopian, Blake thought. This whole situation was terribly terribly wrong but he couldn't deny that the younger children seemed happy. 

Through another door, of human appearance this time, and onto an escalator. They passed through the dome's wall, neither airtight nor guarded now, and the vast bulk of Liberator lay in front of them, the escalator disappearing into her side hatch. Blake breathed a sigh of relief. At least his ship was here. 

The empty flight deck looked no different. As he stepped forward Zen's lights flickered and the familiar voice said _Crew member Roj Blake detected. Awaiting command._

Jared let out a small shriek. Dalia grabbed Blake’s hand then let it go again, embarrassed. “It's never done that before.” 

“Zen report.” Blake walked over to his console. 

_All systems functional. Non crew members detected. Crew genetic material detected. Awaiting command._

“How long had it been since there was a crew member on board?” 

_Seventeen years, five months..._

“How long since there was a conscious crew member on board?” 

_Sixty eight years, one month, fourteen hours, fifty two minutes and five seconds_

It was all true. Gods. How could it be true? He pulled up report after report to his console, the teenagers quiet and wide eyed beside him. 

He'd got his place in the med unit and accidentally become the father of the new human race simply because he'd lost consciousness first. The others had succumbed one by one over the next few weeks. Avon had been the last; he'd commanded Zen to take Liberator to Earth once he was asleep. He'd died in the med room, close to Blake's still sleeping body. Maybe he'd planned to take Blake's place in a desperate last hope for survival. Whether he'd intended to or not he hadn't done it. 

He should have, Blake thought. The human race would stand a lot more chance with Avon's genes than his own, and Avon would doubtless have survived without the appalling loneliness that was threatening to overwhelm Blake now that he was here on Liberator and the others were gone.

Fifty years- there must still have been remains. "Why didn’t the not humans take the DNA of other humans as well to make you?" he demanded of Dalia.. How could they have put the whole thing on him? 

Dalia looked helpless.”Jared?”

Jared nodded, frowning. There was a pause while he apparently tried to work out what to say. “Children have died,” he said, hesitantly.

Died? That gave Blake an unexpected pang of desolation.”How?”

“Things that happen,” Dalia said. 

“Accidents?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Fourteen.” Neither of them had to look that figure up, he noticed.

Fourteen children dead and not a single parent to mourn them. Blake wondered if the not humans had any idea of the inhumanity of what they had done.

“The children who have died, are dead.” Jared said. “They are anywhere. The humans before- they are everywhere. Not anywhere.” The distinction was clearly important if incomprehensible. 

“But their bodies must have been here when the aliens arrived!" Blake insisted.

Jared shrugged." Everywhere," he said. Clearly there were limits to their translation powers. 

There was someone else he could ask. “Zen. What happened to the crew after they died?” Blake’s voice was shaking.

 _The bodies were recycled by the ship,_ Zen said. 

Blake had a sudden image of the little bots disassembling Avon so that his body would fit into the recycling pods and he threw up. One of Liberator’s bots skittered out from a wall recess to clear the mess up and he was sick again and again, retching on his hands and knees as if he’d never stop.

A warm arm wrapped around his shoulders. Someone was patting his back, gently but firmly. Good kids, he thought. Despite everything, how had they managed to be good kids?

He knelt up and met their worried eyes. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s all right. I’m all right.”

“It is not all right,” Jared said sadly. “Your people are not anywhere.” 

Not anywhere. For the first time the absolute finality of that phrase reached him and he couldn’t hold back the tears for his friends, his world and fourteen sons and daughters who he'd never meet. The children- his children - held onto him until he stopped. 

Then he sat on the floor in silence, wondering what he should do next. 

“Food,” Dalia said. “Humans are even more useless when hungry.” 

It sounded like a quote. “Is that what the not human say?” 

“No,” she said. “That is what Orac says.”

If he hadn’t already been on his knees he would have been knocked off his feet with surprise. “Orac? It's on Earth?” 

“It's in there.” She gestured at a closed door off to the computer room. “We don't have access though.” 

Blake stood up. “This is my ship. Zen. Open that door.” 

It slid open. As Blake entered a familiar querulous voice said, **An appointment is always required. I'm busy. Go away.**

Of course. That was where the children had picked up their accent. Blake found himself smiling for the first time since he'd woken. He came forward to rest a hand on its casing. “What are you busy doing, Orac?” 

There was a perceptible pause. 

**I was not informed that you had regained consciousness.** Orac said. **I will now need to recalculate many recommendations. Kindly inform everyone that I must be left alone for at least seventeen hours.**

“Not yet,” Blake said. “I have about a million questions first.” He could see a dozen cables running from its case to various devices. “First off, what are you doing right now?”

 **I am currently giving twenty eight different lectures on aspects of human science and culture,** Orac said. **I am also monitoring weather and crop conditions outside the Dome and providing treatment and harvest recommendations. I am calculating future population dynamics and liaising with the not human about the classification of potentially detrimental genes and the predicted long term risks and benefits involved in removing them. I am...**

“Enough!” Blake said. “ Avon always said that you could only really do one thing at once”

 **The size of the task involved in the recreation of human civilisation requires many more than one thing to be done at once. It was necessary to adapt.** Orac sounded even more annoyed than usual. **I have not had a microsecond of peace and quiet for over seventeen years.**

“What about the fifty years before?”

 **The absence of interruptions was gratifying,** Orac said, **but there was too little new data. I advised Kerr Avon that the Liberator should be permanently mobile to maximise scientific observations but he insisted that a landing on Earth would produce the highest chance of your successful resurrection and therefore completion of my new primary objective.**

“What objective was that?”

**The delivery of his message.**

“He left me a message? Why haven’t you given it to me.”

 **It is not time critical, since it contains no pertinent information,** Orac said. 

Blake gestured out of the door. “Would you mind waiting out there?” he said to the children. He closed the door behind them. “Play it now!”

 _Blake,_ Avon’s voice sounded tired but determined. _Well. It’s two months since you succumbed. The others are dead; peacefully enough, if that makes a difference. I have a few hours left. All the antiviral trials have failed and Orac hasn’t been able to trace a single uninfected human settlement, so no prospect of a last minute reprieve this time. It appears that when you and I really put our mind to something it gets done very thoroughly indeed._

There was a brief pause. _I regret having to do this but at this stage you and Liberator’s med unit are my only options left. Making you do this instead of me isn’t entirely selfish. I have many skills but a vision that extends beyond my own advantage isn’t one of them. It is yours. I have no idea of the circumstances under which you are listening to this message but I expect that you will make the most of them, if there is anything at all to be made. If there isn’t I’m leaving you with a gun._

Another longer pause. _I believe that’s all I have to say. I can’t claim it was all fun but hanging around with you was certainly interesting. I suppose I should wish you good luck and goodbye at this point. End message._

“Play it again,” Blake said. He listened one more time, then he opened the door. 

“I need to spend some time on my ship,” he told the children. “Can you come back tomorrow morning?”

 

The galley was fully functional. Dalia and Jared seemed entirely familiar with coffee. Blake reminded himself that they might have been raised by aliens but they’d still been born and always lived on Earth.

He rubbed his eyes, a little sleepy. He’d spent all night firing questions at Orac and Zen. After sixty eight years more sleep wasn’t high on his priorities. There would be all the time in the world for that. 

“There were hundreds of thousands of human-settled worlds,” he told the children. “Some of them had no outside contacts for hundreds of years. It is quite possible that there are untouched communities out there somewhere who will some day develop space travel, encounter the virus and die. They desperately need the genetic protection the not humans developed and you desperately need a wider genetic pool.” 

He put down his empty mug. “I’m going to take Liberator to look for them.” 

They glanced at each other, apparently unsurprised. “We will come with you,” Dalia said.

That was unexpected. Blake didn’t want then, but he couldn’t say that. “You’re needed here.”

“We are two of thirteen thousand,” Dalia said. “Roj Blake and Liberator and Orac are each one. Who will bring the ship and the DNA back to us if you do not live? We will come with you to keep you safe and bring you all home.”

Home was Liberator, not Earth. But Dalia had a point, Blake thought. He had given these children little enough except their confusing and difficult lives. Liberator and Orac might be all of his legacy and their birthright. 

To find other survivors was the most urgent and important thing that he could do, important enough to pull Orac away from his many responsibilities on Earth, urgent enough to justify turning his back on the parentless children that had been made in his image. If there was any better chance of their quest succeeding with three of them, what right did he have to the selfish privacy he craved in order to mourn everything he’d lost? 

He knew so little about them but in the circumstances he could hardly call them strangers. “How long will you need to get ready?” he asked.

Jared beamed. “Some hours. We must speak to our cohort and to the not human. Thank you.” He frowned a little. “May we call you Father?”

Blake would really rather that they didn’t but what basis did he have to deny them? They had lived fifteen years parentless and that, like everything else about this situation, was essentially his fault. “If you wish.”

He saw them off the ship, their chatter as excited as any teenagers might be in the circumstances even if their syntax was strange. They were so young to be taken into danger but himself aside, they were the oldest humans on Earth. He couldn’t wait three or four years for them to become adult and he already conceded that he couldn’t leave them behind. He’d just have to keep them safe, and rely on the not human to keep their watchful eyes on the rest of them while he was away. 

“Circumstances,” he said to the achingly empty space at the next console, “are stranger than you could possibly imagine. I’m not yet ready to forgive you for doing this to me, but I’ll have to see what I can make of it, I suppose. And, by the way, you were wrong. It was fun.”

There didn’t seem much in the way of fun ahead of Blake now, but given what he’d done he could hardly expect any. However as he checked the final take off path with Zen a little later he found a slight pulse of joy at the idea of taking Liberator out among the stars again, even without his crew, even into a galaxy empty of people. She was still his ship, even though everything else had changed. Life wasn’t over until it was over. There were yet again people he was responsible for, something he might do to put things right. 

Blake pulled the gun out from its holster where he’d been carrying it since he woke and slotted it back into the gun rack to recharge. He’d keep going. Avon had known that he would. He might not have many virtues but he was stubborn, which presumably mean that the entire human race was stubborn now. There could be worse traits, given the circumstances. He didn’t have any right to be optimistic but he felt it creeping in anyway. 

“Take hold,” he told his son and daughter. “Zen, engage engines. Take off.” And his ship rose smoothly and steadily away from the Earth.


End file.
